All language subtitles for 7- LUBURIĆ - ‘Croatian Himmler’_ What Happened to Luburić 20 Years after WWII (1080p)

April 1941, Zagreb.
As the Axis powers carve

up Yugoslavia, a new fascist state rises under
the banner of the fanatical Ustaša organization,

pledging loyalty to Adolf Hitler and promising
a purified Croatia. In the months that follow,

Jasenovac - a complex of 5 subcamps emerges
along the Sava River, a place that will earn

the nickname “the Balkan Auschwitz.” In
the years to follow, even German Nazis,

accustomed to organized mass murder, reportedly
recoil at the savagery unfolding inside Jasenovac.

Prisoners are butchered with knives,
beaten to death, and burned alive,

while guards compete in acts of cruelty that
blur the line between ideology and madness.

At the centre of this system stands a man who
transforms killing into ritual and terror into

policy. He cultivates an atmosphere in which
slaughter is praised as patriotism and every

guard feels summoned to prove loyalty through
bloodshed. German officials quietly describe

him as unstable and pathological, while survivors
remember him as the most ruthless sadist they ever

encountered. After the war, he escapes to Spain
and lives in exile for decades. But in the end,

he will pay for his crimes with his own
life. His name is Vjekoslav Luburić.

Vjekoslav Luburić was born on 6 March 1914 in
the village of Humac in Herzegovina, then part

of Austria-Hungary, in a region marked by ethnic
tension and political unrest. In December 1918,

his father was shot – according to some accounts
by a Serbian police officer - while smuggling

tobacco and he died of blood loss. Following
his father’s death, Luburić came to detest

and resent Serbs, feelings that hardened as he
grew older. Shortly thereafter, his sister Olga

committed suicide by jumping into a river after
their mother forbade her from marrying a Muslim.

In the turbulent years after the collapse of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the village of

Humac became part of the new Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats, and Slovenes, a state dominated by The

House of Karađorđević - the Serbian royal family.
In 1929, King Alexander I formally renamed it the

Kingdom of Yugoslavia, further centralizing
power in Belgrade—developments that fuelled

resentment among many Croatian nationalists.
Luburić grew increasingly hostile during his

school years, frequently clashing with teachers
and spending time with Croatian nationalist

youths who openly rejected the Serbian-led
monarchy. In 1931 he joined the Ustaše,

a radical Croatian fascist movement committed to
building an independent state through violence,

and soon went into exile in Hungary,
where he remained for the next ten years.

The Second World War began on 1 September
1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. When

Germany’s ally Italy failed to conquer Greece
in the late autumn and winter of 1940–1941,

Germany became more concerned about securing
its southeastern flank in the Balkans.

Greece’s success in repulsing Italian
forces allowed its ally, Great Britain,

to establish a foothold on the European continent.
To subdue Greece and move the British off the

European mainland, Nazi Germany sought to bring
Yugoslavia and Bulgaria into Axis alliance,

which was a military coalition
led by Germany, Italy and Japan.

On 25 March 1941, Yugoslavia joined the
Axis and agreed to permit transit through

its territory to German troops headed for Greece.
The announcement of the agreement was extremely

unpopular in many parts of the country,
particularly in Serbia and Montenegro and

the Yugoslav government announced that it would
not honour its obligations under the agreement.

Hitler was furious and although the prime
minister, General Dušan Simović, sought within

days to retract this statement, Hitler ordered the
invasion of Yugoslavia on the evening of 27 March.

The invasion, involving German, Italian,
Hungarian, and Bulgarian military units,

commenced on 6 April 1941. Later that same month,
on 17 April, the Yugoslav army surrendered,

and the country was then occupied
and partitioned by the Axis powers.

In the spring of 1941, as the Independent State
of Croatia was proclaimed, its leaders made clear

what they intended to do with the country’s Serb
population, which numbered nearly two million

people and made up about thirty percent of the
state. Senior Ustaše officials openly stated that

one third would be killed, one third expelled, and
one third forced to convert to Roman Catholicism.

In early April 1941, Luburić illegally crossed
the Yugoslav border and entered the newly created

state. On 6 May, he was sent to the village of
Veljun near the town of Slunj with about fifty

Ustaše under his command, many of them longtime
militants who had lived in exile in Italy. Their

task was to round up roughly four hundred Serb
men in retaliation for the murder of a Croat

family in the town of Blagaj the night before.
The actual perpetrators were never identified,

but the men of Veljun were declared responsible.
On the evening of 9 May, the prisoners were taken

to Blagaj and brought into the yard of a local
elementary school. There, over the course of the

night, they were killed with knives and
blunt objects. At dawn, Luburić was seen

walking out of the schoolyard covered in blood,
washing his hands and sleeves at a nearby well.

By the end of July 1941, at least
1,800 Serbs had been killed across

the Lika region, and entire
villages had fallen silent.

Around this time, Luburić was appointed head
of concentration camps in the Independent State

of Croatia in which he would play a role similar
to Heinrich Himmler in Nazi Germany — overseeing

the camp system and transforming ideological
hatred into organized mass murder. In May 1941,

one month after they came into power, Ustaše
authorities began constructing the Jasenovac

concentration camp complex, the largest
camp in the state and a central site of

imprisonment and mass murder targeting Serbs,
Jews, Roma people, and political opponents.

In late September 1941, Luburić was
sent to Germany for ten days to study

methods used in German concentration camps.
After visiting camps such as Sachsenhausen,

he returned with practical knowledge that
shaped the organization of Jasenovac,

which was guarded by more than 1500 Ustaše.
Luburić visited Jasenovac regularly,

often two or three times each month,
and insisted on personally killing at

least one prisoner during his inspections. He
taunted inmates about the manner and timing of

their execution and would press his revolver
against a prisoner’s head, sometimes firing,

sometimes lowering the weapon and walking away.
Attempts to introduce gas vans failed,

and a gas chamber constructed at the Jasenovac
subcamp of Stara Gradiška was abandoned after

several months. Most prisoners were instead
killed with knives or blunt instruments,

methods that required direct participation and
left little distance between guard and victim.

By early 1945, the military position of the
Independent State of Croatia had deteriorated

rapidly as Partisan forces under Josip Broz Tito
advanced across the region. With front lines

collapsing and German authority weakening, Luburić
was reassigned from the camp system and given

a new task inside the country. In mid-February
1945, he arrived in the city of Sarajevo - today’s

capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina - with orders to
destroy the communist underground operating there.

Luburić established his headquarters
in a villa in the city centre,

a building that residents soon began calling
the “house of terror.” From this residence,

he appointed a group of Ustaše officers to
conduct arrests and executions and created

what he called the Criminal War Court of Commander
Luburić. The court handled accusations of treason

but also minor charges, and sentences were
frequently carried out within hours of arrest.

Arrests were widespread and often
arbitrary. Suspected communists, refugees,

and ordinary civilians were taken to the villa for
interrogation. Luburić fostered an atmosphere of

intimidation and encouraged methods designed to
break prisoners physically and psychologically.

Prisoners’ hands were tied behind their backs,
pulled between their legs, and secured with a rod

placed beneath their knees before being suspended
upside down and beaten. He reportedly summoned

relatives of detainees and described in detail
how their loved ones had been tortured and killed.

In late March 1945, fifty-five residents
were hanged from trees and streetlamps in

central Sarajevo, with signs placed around
their necks reading “Long live the Leader,”

referring to Ante Pavelić, head of the
Ustaše state. Their bodies were left

suspended in public view as a warning, and those
attempting to retrieve them were fired upon.

Towards the end of the war, Luburić was
promoted to the rank of General. In the

final weeks of the regime, he ordered that the
remaining prisoners at Jasenovac be killed,

that camp documentation be destroyed,
and that bodies from nearby mass graves

be exhumed and burned in an
attempt to eliminate evidence.

Tito’s partisan forces entered Sarajevo on 6
April 1945 and proclaimed the city liberated.

In the backyard of Luburić's villa,
investigators uncovered numerous bodies,

including those of children. An American
journalist later described a room filled

with corpses stacked one upon another. Among the
victims was Halid Nazečić, whose body bore signs

of extreme mutilation—his eyes gouged out and
his intimate parts burned with boiling water.

The Second World War in Europe ended on
8 May 1945. Luburić fled and eventually

settled in Spain, making his home in the town
of Carcaixent, near Valencia. In November 1953,

he married a Spanish woman named Isabela
Hernaiz and the marriage produced four children,

two sons and two daughters. During his earlier
exile in Hungary, Luburić also fathered a son.

During his years in Spain, Luburić remained active
in Croatian nationalist émigré circles. In the

end, however, he faced justice for the atrocities
he had committed during the Second World War.

On the morning of 21 April 1969, Luburić’s
teenage son discovered the bloodied body of his

55-year-old father in a bedroom of their home in
Carcaixent. He had been killed the previous day,

on 20 April. Blood stains on the floor
indicated that he had been dragged by his

feet from the kitchen and pushed beneath a bed.
Declassified Yugoslav intelligence records later

identified his godson, Ilija Stanić, as an agent
of the Yugoslav secret service. According to the

minutes of Stanić’s May 1969 debriefing, he first
poisoned Luburić’s coffee, which had been supplied

by another agent and when the poison failed to
take effect, Stanić went to his room and retrieved

a hammer. As Luburić complained that he felt
unwell and leaned over the sink to vomit, Stanić

struck him several times on the head, causing
him to collapse. He briefly left the kitchen

to secure the front door, then returned and
delivered another blow that fractured his skull.

Stanić wrapped the body in blankets, dragged it
into a nearby bedroom, and hid it under the bed

before leaving the house and fleeing to France. An
autopsy determined that Luburić did not die from

the head wounds but suffocated in his own blood.
In those final moments, as he struggled for

breath, one can only wonder whether he regretted
the deaths of tens of thousands of Serbs,

Roma people, and Jews murdered under his
authority during the Second World War.

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